ASUS Gryphon Z87 Review
Published by Marc Büchel on 22.10.13Page:
Conclusion
| Overall | + | - | |
| At a first glance the Gryphon Z87 definitely leaves a very good impression. For an attractive prics of a little bit more than 100 Euro you get a convincing feature mix as well as decent components. Additionally this board turned out to be surprisingly efficient regarding power consumption. In this case one could even build efficient office PC's based on the Gryphon. | -
Design - Layout - mATX |
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| Layout | + | - | |
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Basically the ASUS Gryphon Z87's Layout has been very well thought. Once more practical are the angled SATA connectors. Unfortunately there are no power- or reset-buttons and there also isn't a debug LED. Regarding the PCI-Express x16 slots there we have nothing to complain about. A closer look at the area around the CPU socket shows, that there is plenty of space to install big aircoolers without running into any issues. Should you choose to buy the Gryphon Z87 with the Armor Kit, then you get additional thermal probes for a more sophisticated temperature management as well as looks which suggest higher quality. Other than that we don't see a benefit from the Armor Kit. |
- Angled SATA connectors - Space around the CPU socket | - No Power/Reset-Button onboard - No debug display | |
| Performance | + | - | |
| Let's first have closer look at overall 3D performance. Calcualting the average of all 3D benchmarks we ran, we see that this board ranks in the center span of our comparison tables. Concerning the average of all 2D performance results the it again ranks in the center span. Furthermore, when we dig deeper into the individual results, we see that there were a few glitches. On another note we were actually surprised about the power consumption of this board. We didn't expect it to be this efficient on power consumption. In case of idle testing the Gryphon Z87 achives an excellent second place and in case of load testing it's been the most efficient Z87 motherboard we've had for testing so far. This result is also the reason why recommend this board for environments, where computing has to be as energy efficient as possible. | -
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bandwidth - UC Bench - Bioshock: Infinite Low - Metro Last Light High |
- 3DMark Ice Storm - SiSoft Sandra Multimedia - SiSoft Sandra Memory Latency |
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| Overclocking / BIOS | + | - | |
| As you might have expected from ASUS you get an excellent BIOS which offers not only a boatload of tuning and tweaking options but is also very easy to use. Despite the fact, that with TUF Series motherboards you get ASUS' standard BIOS, there are plenty of functions and parameters that can be altered. Other than that there is a clean structure, which makes it really easy to find the parameter you're looking for. | - Clear arrangement - Sheer amount of options | ||
| Recommendation | + | - | |
| Should you be looking for a solid mATX motherboard which features either a special design, is highly energy efficient or you want both of that at once, then the ASUS Gryphon Z87 is an excellent choice. | -
Enthusiast build - Gaming - Office/Desktop |
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| Rating | |||
| We give the ASUS Gryphon Z87 very good 4.5 out of 5 stars. | |||
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Author: m.buechel@ocaholic.ch
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